Even though SEO has the term “search engine” in the name, it’s not just about optimizing your content for Google or Bing. SEO is a comprehensive, holistic approach to making your website content discoverable, accessible, fast, and easily digestible.
While much of what is known as SEO focuses on creating consistent, unique, and helpful content for users, the technical efforts to improve a website’s visibility in search engine results are just as important.
There are elements to technical SEO that are as significant for search engines as they are for the website visitors.
When you optimize page performance, when you make your website more responsive to mobile browsing, and when you organize your content logically, you positively impact the user experience of your website. This usually translates to increased engagement, longer dwell times (the time the user spends on your site), and increased likelihood for the visitor to convert to whatever goals you have set for their visit.
Technical SEO is a crucial component of digital marketing and user experience design. Due to the double function of catering to search engines and to website visitors, you should have a strong incentive to understand the basics of SEO.
Consider this…
Your online retail store has thousands of product pages, dozens upon dozens of category pages, sitemaps, blogs, expert articles, brand promotion pages, and campaign landing pages.
In all honesty, it’s a mess. Your content management system is buckling under the weight of all the integrations and dynamically generated content. Content loads slowly, there is a lot of outdated product metadata, and while your organic search engine traffic seems to be pretty solid, it doesn’t generate nearly as much engagement as you’d like.
However, you are afraid of changing anything because you don’t know if it will negatively impact your organic search visibility. You’ve heard of horror stories where changes to site structure have resulted in complete decimation of content rankings in search engine results.
Where should you start?
Should you fix the low-hanging fruit first? You would need to conduct a full technical SEO audit of the site, which analyzes obvious problems such as:
- Content that is unintentionally blocked from search engine crawling and/or indexing
- Duplicate content that “cannibalizes” its own search engine visibility
- Lack of proper analytics to see the dead spots in your organic traffic
- Performance bottlenecks
- Incomplete or missing structured data
- Usability of the site on mobile devices
- Search engines have indexed broken redirects and deleted content
Regardless of the scope of your issues, fixing the technical problems is always a good idea. As mentioned above, you are not only solving for search engines – you are also addressing the general usability of your website.
Since a website is a living, constantly evolving manifestation of your digital brand, your technical SEO approach should be a process that you nurture and periodically re-evaluate.
Much of the work you do in SEO is a marathon rather than a sprint.